SAN FRANCISCO--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--Riverbed Technology®, The Digital Performance Company™, today
announced that The Sol Group, the largest independent supplier of
petroleum-based products to the Caribbean basin, is using Riverbed®
SteelConnect™ to greatly simplify network management for its 40 branch
offices throughout the region. SteelConnect is a software-defined wide
area networking (SD-WAN) and cloud networking solution that provides all
branch and local offices with fast and secure access to the company’s
centralized business applications, and is helping accelerate Sol’s
adoption of cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.
SteelConnect significantly reduces the management complexity posed by
the variety of connectivity options the company uses in its hybrid
network across the Caribbean, which include MPLS, Internet and cellular.
Sol plans to soon expand the use of SteelConnect to other business
segments in its network.

“It could be an accountant, a
salesperson, or someone at the front desk”

The Sol Group is the largest independent petroleum marketing company in
the Caribbean basin, with operations spanning 23 countries. The company
supplies fuels, lubricants, and LPG through an extensive service station
network and supplies petroleum-based products to commercial customers
involved in shipping, luxury boating, aviation, mining, trucking and
fleet operations. The business is managed by 40 local offices supported
by the corporate head office in Barbados.

“We're in many different countries that are separated by water. There
are different governments, different regulations, and different
technologies being used,” explained Earl Mayers, regional IT manager for
The Sol Group. We needed to find a networking solution that would allow
us to have effective communications and reduce our TCO on such a diverse
infrastructure.”

Simplifying remote IT management while assuring digital performance was
a major concern several years ago as the company looked to centralize
its core business applications. Prior to that, applications were hosted
locally, making the role of the network less important while also having
a high TCO. To ensure that all branch and local offices would have fast
and secure access to financial systems and other applications once they
were delivered over long distances from a data center, Mayers was
looking at very expensive upgrades to existing circuits. “We saw that
the cost was going to be tremendous, or the centralization wasn’t going
to be effective,” Mayers explained.

Instead he turned to SD-WAN, which offered the advantage of managing
multiple types of network connections with one solution. After looking
at several companies’ offerings, he chose Riverbed SteelConnect. “We
felt very strong about the ability of Riverbed to actually deliver. In
addition, going with Riverbed gives us the option to scale up and
integrate other Riverbed technologies,” Mayers said.

For Mayers, the main benefit of SteelConnect is the ease of network
management. Not only can he monitor the network from a single pane of
glass. Changes that used to take hours now take just one or two clicks,
with application-centric policies that automatically get pushed to all
appliances. “The ease of the administration, the ability to make changes
– it's simplified but it's not simplistic. It is simple enough to
understand but so powerful,” he added.

The ease of management extends beyond his office, which is important
because only six of the 40 remote offices have an IT specialist on site.
Today, when Mayers needs to add a new location to the network, he can
design first, and deploy later. Using SteelConnect “shadow appliances,”
The Sol Group defines performance and security policies ahead of time,
then simply ships the SteelConnect to the remote site when ready. Anyone
at that location can plug it in. “It could be an accountant, a
salesperson, or someone at the front desk,” Mayers noted. “Any
non-technical end user can just plug the device in and it functions at
once. We can access it from anywhere with an Internet connection. It’s
fantastic.”

Mayers said that calls regarding connectivity problems stopped after
SteelConnect was installed, and that the centralization of the financial
system and other applications is working well.

With SteelConnect in place, and the ability to bring in other integrated
Riverbed solutions as needed, such as SteelHead SaaS (for accelerating
public cloud-based applications), and SteelCentral (for application and
network performance monitoring), Mayers feels ready for the future.
“Longer-term, we are going to bring other business segments into the
network and leverage some of the benefits of cloud-based solutions,” he
said. “With Riverbed, we are future-proofing our plans, while reducing
our TCO.”

Continued SteelConnect Momentum and Innovation

SteelConnect, initially launched as an early access offering in April
2016, is the industry’s first and only product that provides unified
connectivity and policy-based orchestration spanning the entire network
– LAN/WLAN (including cloud-based Riverbed Xirrus Wi-Fi), WAN, data
center and the cloud, with one-click connectivity and optimization into
AWS and Microsoft Azure. SteelConnect also enables zero-touch
provisioning, allowing an enterprise to set-up a global network and
connect to the cloud in minutes, and easy ongoing network management
that provides the ability to make network or business/application policy
changes with a few clicks of a mouse.

Since the initial launch of SteelConnect, Riverbed has continued a rapid
pace of innovation, introducing a broad set of unique capabilities,
including integration with SteelCentral for visibility and insight,
integration with the market-leading WAN Optimization solution (Riverbed
SteelHead SD), and following the strategic
acquisition of Xirrus (leading cloud-based Wi-Fi company) in May
2017, enterprise-grade Wi-Fi – bringing the power of policy-based
network management out to the wireless edge. SteelConnect also
seamlessly integrates with third-party network security services, such
as Zscaler’s
cloud security platform, to help IT professionals achieve agility,
performance and security across the distributed enterprise.

Riverbed®, The Digital Performance Company™, enables organizations to
maximize digital performance across every aspect of their business,
allowing customers to rethink possible. Riverbed’s unified and
integrated Digital Performance Platform™ brings together a powerful
combination of Digital Experience, Cloud Networking and Cloud Edge
solutions that provides a modern IT architecture for the digital
enterprise, delivering new levels of operational agility and
dramatically accelerating business performance and outcomes. At more
than $1 billion in annual revenue, Riverbed’s 30,000+ customers include
98% of the Fortune 100 and 100% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at riverbed.com.

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein
are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used
herein belong to their respective owners.